246. Gamify Your Environmental Impact | Katie Patrick
Education and awareness aren’t enough to change the world; we need action. It’s highly likely that you care about protecting the environment. But what are you doing about it? Katie Patrick is here today to explain the science behind human behavior and share how you can gamify your actions so they have a positive impact on the planet.
Katie is an environmental engineer and designer with a passion for behavioral science. She is on a mission to make it easier for people to make positive environmental changes. She is the creator of various gamification tools (e.g. Block Club, Zerowastify, and Energy Lollipop) that help people measure their impact, reduce their waste, and cut their emissions.
Episode Highlights:
Behavioral science is the science of how humans do things (e.g. if you see other people littering, you are more likely to litter yourself). Gamification, on the other hand, involves coming up with simple ways to track progress between where you are now and where you want to be (e.g. decreasing the size of your carbon footprint) and using rewards to keep yourself motivated. [11:37]
Education isn’t enough to change behaviors. Most people care about the environment already, but we need to use tools, dashboards, and reward systems to make it easier to actually do the actions that have a positive impact. [19:47]
An example of gamifying your environmental impact: to reduce the amount of waste you are producing, measure it (e.g. the number of trash bags coming out of your house per week), make it visible (e.g. write the number somewhere you can see it), create a goal (e.g. to reduce the number of trash bags by half), look at your behaviors and develop actions that will reduce the amount of waste (e.g. stop buying disposable nappies and plastic water bottles), keep measuring, give yourself rewards when your weekly trash is reducing (e.g. a smiley face on your calendar). [23:00]
Find people to join you on your environmental gamification mission. It’s much easier to stick to something when you have a community holding you accountable, and people are much more likely to change their behavior when they there are people around them who they can emulate. [26:08]
You don’t need any complicated applications to create a community. WhatsApp and other social media channels are very effective methods for connecting with people who can become your accountability partners. [32:04]
Get out of your bubble! Sharing your beliefs with people who think differently from you may cause a lot of frustration, but it's the only way to create social diffusion. [51:35]
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